Building and breaking the vision of utopia

In his latest movie, The Village, M. Night Shyamalan again
displays his own distinctive combination of suspense and horror, which differs
in both kind and degree from the work of his fellow toilers in the dark mines
of dread. His best known work, successful or not, often blends the humdrum and
the ordinary with genuine mystery, interrupted by moments of powerful shock.

A kind of family melodrama provides
the foundation for such different films as The
Sixth Sense (still his most popular movie), the dull stinker Unbreakable, and the generally silly and
illogical Signs. Their sensation is
grounded in the familiar complications of guilt and confusion that trouble even
the most placidly domestic lives.

In The Village the writer-director establishes a small 19th-century
community isolated in the American wilderness, far from civilization,
apparently one of those many utopian colonies that proliferated all over the
country in that time. Governed by a council of elders in a kind of consensual
democracy, separated from the commerce and activity of the outside world, the
people of the settlement live in a state of contentment based on trust, peace,
and innocence.

Ominously, however, they allude
cryptically to "Those We Do Not Speak Of," mysterious and frightening creatures
who dwell in the surrounding forest outside the perimeter of the village. After
some period of coexistence, the creatures now threaten the inhabitants.

Some mysterious events suggest that
the creatures, for unknown reasons, are growing bolder and more aggressive
toward the villagers. They awake in the mornings to find their livestock
slaughtered and skinned, then to discover streaks of blood marking their doors,
and at night, cowering in their cellars, they listen fearfully to the tramp of
the unseen monsters' feet and their horrible scratching at the walls of their
houses.

Against the background of increasing
danger, the picture concentrates on the lives of several of the villagers,
especially the family of Edward Walker (William Hurt), the schoolteacher and
one of the elders, whose blind daughter Ivy (Bryce Dallas Howard) falls in love
with Lucius Hunt (Joaquin Phoenix). Ivy's relationship with Lucius and with
Noah Percy (Adrien Brody), the village idiot, provides the central motivation
for the various moments of shock and fright that indicate the precariousness of
the community's vision of peace and innocence.

When Lucius suffers a terrible
injury, Ivy volunteers to trek through the woods to obtain medicine in what the
villagers call The Towns. Believing her blindness and innocence will protect
her, Walker approves the journey, which leads to the full revelation of the
film's mystery.

The originality of the
writer-director's conception and the meticulous creation of the houses,
furniture, implements, clothing, and manners, of the time, even a certain
19th-century formality of utterance, compensates for the generally predictable
and essentially preposterous resolution of the puzzle. Shyamalan carefully
manipulates his characters within the constricted world of the isolated
community, convincingly establishing their good will, their contentment, and
above all, their innocence.

He allows the necessary exposition to
develop organically out of the speech and actions of the people, so we discover
gradually that the elders left civilization and founded their village in order
to escape the violence of the outside world and to preserve the innocence of
succeeding generations.

Perhaps inadvertently, the picture
suggests, however, that whatever the intentions of its founders, the village
itself cultivates the seeds of its present distress, that the unspeakable
creatures symbolize a failure within rather than without their boundary, some
fault in their vision and its interpretation, that their ideal community
depends as much on deception as on hope and love.

Certainly the menace that Ivy
encounters on her dangerous trek through the forest resembles at times the
forest itself, fraught with natural peril --- the snapping of twigs, the
moaning of the wind through the bare trees, the sharp branches that claw at
her, the treacherous ground she stumbles over --- so that the creature she
encounters also seems both a part of the woods and a part of the village.

The cast performs with great skill,
particularly Bryce Dallas Howard, who occupies the central role in the picture,
nicely combining innocence with humor and intelligence, and really carrying the
burden of the movie's considerable suspense and shock. William Hurt's careful
diction and idiosyncratic cadences seem particularly effective for the 19th-century
vocabulary and syntax. In one strong scene with Sigourney Weaver, who plays
Lucius Hunt's mother, the two of them declare their love for each other, and
its impossibility, without touching or even speaking of their emotion,
conveying a wealth of meaning through the most minimal movement and gestures.

Whatever its faults, The Village succeeds through the careful
sets, the fine acting, and the originality of its writer-director's vision. It
also reminds us, intentionally or not, that utopia actually means "no place."